


muscle memories

by strikereurekapitcrew



Series: repetition [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Duck Days 2018, Julia Burnsides Lives, Other, dwelf julia burnsides, eighth bird julia burnsides, part of a larger au, this will fit into a series eventually i just don't know where
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 11:25:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14851847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikereurekapitcrew/pseuds/strikereurekapitcrew
Summary: There are some memories, Lucretia realizes after her family has come home, that she will never be able to take from them.





	muscle memories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShinySkuntank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinySkuntank/gifts).



> I am really taken with Magcretia as a ship, but also with Magnus and Julia, so here I am, combining everything I want with a polyship, an everybody lives AU, and eighth bird Julia.

There are some memories, Lucretia realizes after her family has come home, that she will never be able to take from them.

Taako’s need to sleep fully cocooned.  
Merle’s lecherous behavior with plants.  
Magnus’ incessant inability to understand why he shouldn’t just strip in front of everyone.

There’s memory that’s still there, even if none of them know what it means, or why it is.

It’s in the way that Merle, a shitty father after she took their century away from him, looks out for his team mates in a fatherly way despite.

It’s in the way that Taako still holds entire conversations with Davenport, though at his most lucid the gnomish man only utters his own name in varying tones and inflections.

It’s how Magnus, not knowing why and just chalking it up to being the kind of guy to do so, offers Lucretia -his boss- a hug and leaves the offer on the table when she politely refuses.

Her family was little before, and broken, but still good. She had broken them even more, selfishly and foolish, but there are things she sees that even Fisher cannot erase from them.

With Julia, she’s not sure if this is a good thing or a bad one.

Because, for Julia, the bulk of what seems to stay in some way or another is what made Lucretia fall some kind of in love with her so many times over, long before a seemingly endless century was brought to a screaming, abrupt halt.

The boys and Merle are much more overt with their… everything. A decade away, a lifetime on Toril, and they are still as familiar as they were. Julia is something different, as if the decade apart has molded her into this whole new person. It’s like watching a flower bloom, Julia Burnsides slowly unfolding and revealing her parts to those around her, all in her time.

(Lucretia is intimately aware of why this is the way that it is, and feels guilty in a way she has carried for far too long.)

(When Julia does begin to open, like a peony unfurling in daily sun, Lucretia wants to scream her anguish into the Felicity WIlds and let her pain rend her limb from limb like a chimaera.) 

It all goes back to Legato. Legato is the source of the things that stayed, even if the dwelvish woman doesn’t remember it.

The Legato Conservatory had been Julia’s second favorite cycle, if only because of that year where they landed in a plane inhabited by nothing but dogs. That had been her absolute favorite, ang Magnus’ too. Estranged though they may have been prior to the Hunger devouring their home planar system, Julia’s father had been an elvish artist, and the Conservatory had been a cycle that took Jules back to those roots. It had been a cycle that brought her home, that allowed her to thrive. Everyone had grew that year, but Julia had thrived.

Lucretia remembers it easily. She had spent the year doing everything she could, the way she always had as a child, the way that left Lucretia wondering how she had ever had time to do anything, let alone as well as she was. Julia put a metal sculpture up for the mountain, her work broadcast back with little wait time, but she had done so much. She took up painting under the same teacher that Lucretia did, and practiced music with Lup, danced with… well, anyone but Merle. One day, she had even come back to the ship with her arm covered in the most intricate, delicate tattoo from wrist to shoulder, absolutely in love with it even though she knew it would be gone at the beginning of the next cycle.

(When Julia had come to the Moon Base without her left arm, Lucretia had been devastated, hoping to see her friend claim that tattoo again, and for good this time.)

It was a great year, and it broke Julia’s heart to leave it to its fate, but her experiences colored how she interacted with following worlds, how she devoured art, history, and culture the way the Hunger absolutely absorbed planes.

So, why should she be surprised, seeing her old friend in a paladin’s armor, only for Magnus to laugh and proclaim, “Jules is a bard, too”?

It’s in the way that Julia sings like a bird, a smooth, crisp soprano with a beautiful range.

It’s in the way that she’s able to get Johann to sputter and smile shyly when she asks to play with him, and the way that she manages to get him to play something more lively than his usual funeral dirge melodies, all done simply by picking a careful counterpoint to him. Like dueling violins.

It’s the way that, at Midsummer, she asks Lucretia for a dance ( just one, Madame Director?), the way she always used to -- her hand outstretched and a hopeful grin on her lips. It compels Lucretia to say yes against her better judgment.

The tattoo, she realizes, makes its return in the form of metal engraving on the artificed prosthetic arm. She sobs into her pillow the night that she first sees it, having watched Julia for a moment whilst training with Killian and Carey, the lights of the icosagon catching the elegant detailing.

Even Fisher can’t erase the way the stout woman spins and dips Taako with uproarious laughter, can’t erase how naturally she finds a beat to dance to, to sing, hum, tap her fingers. They can’t erase the casual way that her ears can’t quite seem to keep still when she hears a tune that strikes her. How else could she possibly have become a bard in addition to a paladin when creation dug its claws so deeply into her soul?

More so, it’s the little things like hearing her sing to Angus, or the way she dances as if nobody's watching, even though people stop to do so every time. It’s the way that despite the horrors that they’re facing because of the Relics, Relics that they created even if she doesn’t know it, Julia is able to manage a deep, unyielding love for all the things that make life -in her words- so beautiful.

She collected mementos for as long as Lucretia knew her, and the Director can see glimpses of that girl coming back, typically when she’s bringing things back to share with Angus. Magnus as well, because for all he can’t remember of the century of loving Julia, he can’t help but smile as she talks about the latest thing she’s found interesting, going on about this and that. Lucretia sometimes finds Angus with them, and it makes her heart pang in an uncomfortable way, one that always has her politely excusing herself from their general vicinity whenever they invite her to join them.

No, she doesn’t say when the invitations are extended.  
I would gladly, she also adamantly refuses to say.  
“Excuse me,” she says, and then she’s leaving again, trying to run from her mistakes and the way that they’ve found her so easily. As dignified as she can, she runs from the lovers she erased and the son she abandoned.

There’s one other thing that she can’t erase from Julia, and it’s her. 100 years and then some, how could you eliminate every instance of a love so deep, even with a being as magnificent and misunderstood as the Voidfish?

Julia is the only one other than Magnus who is at least semi-prepared to give personalized gifts at Candlenights. Julia, in fact, is impossibly prepared for gift giving. She’s fixed part of Johann’s violin, knit Killian a sweater in her downtime. She’s even managed a custom leather holster for Avi’s flask, and rebound a set of poetry for Angus. A beautiful hat for Taako, a set of carving tools for Magnus, seed packets twisted into little bombs for guerilla planting for Merle.

It’s just like celebrating Candlenights on the Starblaster, and Lucretia realizes when looking out over Neverwinter that it’s silly to hope for a gift from her oldest friend. Julia hasn’t remembered her in ten years. Plus, Lucretia is her boss now; it’s not entirely appropriate. It has her a bit panicked, even , after Magnus’ backrub coupon.

She doesn’t open the gift until later, long after she’s sent them off to save the world from Lucas’ tomfoolery. She doesn’t open the gift until well after the Day of Story and Song, packing up various things in her office as she’s making the transition from Bureau of Balance to Bureau of Benevolence. Lucretia has sequestered herself away from her family, blighted by the sudden return to themselves and everything it means and will mean as they attempt to move forward.

Julia, as always, is the most amenable to sitting down to speak and make things work for the better of everyone, and Lucretia supposes that’s part of why she goes searching for where she’d hidden the Candlenights gift.

A pair of leather journals, cardinal red, with a matching pair of quills and inkwells, accompanied by a note telling Lucretia that Julia would gladly read her story one day, if she so chose to write it.

Even without her memory, it’s almost as if Julia never truly forgot her, as if their bonds had coiled so deep in her bone marrow that they may as well have been ligaments holding her together.

For all she remembers now, Julia is prepared with tea when Lucretia takes up the offer to talk.


End file.
